Fascinating - and funny! | Cakes and Ale

Not Bad | Cakes and Ale | W. Somerset Maugham

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	• Cakes and Ale W. Somerset Maugham Vintage, 2000 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 19 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Well written but not his greatest.

The reason that I read this book was because I fell in love with W. Somerset Maugham's writing style when I read 'Of Human Bondage'. Unfortunately, I was greatly disappointed to go from 'Of Human Bondage', which is now my favourite book, to 'Cakes & Ale'. From the very beginning I confess that I had difficulty with the storyline. I found myself constantly wondering what the setting was of a scene. I found the character of Roy rather distracting and dull. Despite the fact that the story would not exist if not for his character, I felt that he was of no importance.

The only time that I actually felt myself get interested in the story was when Edward and Rosie Driffield came onto the pages. I enjoyed their characters and the way that they interacted with Ashenden. From the very beginning I liked both of their characters, especially Rosie for her personality.

Although this book was beautiful and so well written I found myself staring down at the pages in awe at times, I did not enjoy it as much as 'Of Human Bondage' and 'The Razor's Edge', which I read directly after 'Cakes & Ale'. I would have to say the only good things about this novel were Edward and Rosie's characters and the last few pages. The one thing that truly turned me against liking this book was the ending. To me it seemed rather abrupt and not at all fitting of the story. It left me cold as the majority of the story did. I was unable to connect with the characters very well, which is something that bothers me to no end. I like to get involved in the book I am reading, feel what the characters are feeling, but there was so little of that here that by the time I finished this book I was admittedly a bit disgusted that I had wasted my time by reading it.

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Fascinating - and funny!

Further to the other excellent reviews here, I'd just like to add my two pennorth. I tried Maugham when in my twenties, but couldn't get into it at all. Now, 20 years on, I am just loving his writing, there is a quiet and subtle humour there that I'd almost completely missed the first time round. As well as painting a fascinating picture of the sheer stuffiness and rigidity of British class society from yesteryear, it's also just funny. I laughed out loud many times reading this book. It's a wonderful piece of writing.

Not Bad

This is an enjoyable book with no aura of greatness. Reading it, even when it gave pleasure, I had the feeling that it was fundamentally a mediocre work.

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Truth, Art and Artifice

In the late 1920's, an aged literary lion, a venerated late Victorian novelist, Edward Driffield, has died and his widow thinks his life should be written down. She appeals to a younger novelist, Alroy Kear, who had attached himself to their society. In turn, he appeals to a friend who he knows must have known the legend earlier in life. The friend he turns to is the first-person narrator of CAKES AND ALE, Ashenden, also a novelist, who gradually reveals to the reader the truth of the deceased's early life. How much he will reveal to the other characters is another thing, and even if he did, the controlling widow, the man's second and much younger wife, would most likely excise what does not fit the public image she had worked hard to preserve. When it comes to pinning down a protagonist, however, the novel turns on the character of Rosie, Driffield's long-gone first wife.

Several things are going on in CAKES AND ALE. One is the real history of Edward Driffield (whose stature and career bear something of a resemblance to Thomas Hardy, who died in 1928), and the narrator's own interlinked coming of age. Then there is the narrator's scathing look at literary society and the machinations by which critical success and public favor are won. He drops a lot of industry insider jokes, and several actual personages are discussed, but he also returns to the eternal writers' theme of who among them will be read past their deaths. Lastly, the sharp contrast between Victorian life and 20th century existence emerges as a dramatic theme; there is the sense that those with one foot in each culture will never be able to fully absorb the rapid change in mores and fashions. The only figure who floats across the divide is the person who from the outset bucked convention of any kind, Rosie.

Maugham infuses the narrative with a sharp wit and good conversation. It is very shrewd and justifiably cynical about human ambitions and weaknesses. The dramatic story unfolds slowly but with tensions and secrets that keep going until the very end. This remains very satisfying reading 75 years after publication.

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Cakes for Some Ale for the Rest

Somerset Maugham has made a career of exploring the role of the troubled artist in society. In CAKES AND ALE, as in MOON AND SIXPENCE, he dissects a society with a literary scalpel merely to expose the wriggling corpse of the artist/prophet on the slide known as the novel. Here his focus is on two novelists. The first is the narrator Ashendon (Maugham himself) who is not the primary character. He rather reports the events over a period of many decades, beginning as a callow youth and ending as a mature doctor/novelist whose success in the latter is less than in the former. The second is Edward Driffield (Thomas Hardy), a writer who has achieved success despite his talent rather than because of it. Maugham goes to great lengths to emphasize that no one, least of all Driffield himself, can explain his eventual rousing acceptance as a literary lion. The best that anyone can do is to imply that becoming a successful writer is nothing more complex than hanging around long enough to convince a fickle public that here is a novelist worthy of the tag of greatness.

Much is made of the novel's pointed satire. Since Maugham as Ashendon was a novelist, it followed (at least to him) that there were rules for advancement. Driffield was just as astonished as anyone at his success. Ashendon could apprehend on a surface level that longevity was surely the key but on a deeper visceral level, he simply could not buy into what the fickle public demanded: that any best-selling author must be ready at any moment to be savaged by dunder-headed critics who could pick apart his latest novel. Maugham is great at name-dropping, or rather job-title dropping. His book is replete with constant reference to meetings, lunches, and soirees with critics, interviewers, and agents, none of whom is the least qualified to spot true genius but all of whom are sure that they have their fingers on the pulse of what passes for literary acclaim by a public that reads the best seller list as assiduously as it does the best sellers on it. Yet, CAKES AND ALE is more than just one author in search of his Muse. Over the decades that Ashendon pursues the Truth About Writing, the figure of Rosie Driffield floats like an interlinking blanket. It is she who appears at convenient moments throughout, first interesting Ashendon to pursue a literary career, then later interesting him in having an affair. We know precious little about Ashendon, about Driffield, or anyone else save her. They are all flat and static. Rosie is a lightning bolt of reality mixed with raw sensuality. She loves men with a fierce abandon and does not confuse the pleasures of the body with those of the soul. She knows the difference as surely as she does the inner reason why her husband's books sell and why other writers' works do not. But for her, success is limited. She requires a man who can supply her the basics of a successful life. When along comes another who can add to the pot, she couples with him fiercely, never complaining, but always counting. She knows what she is and never regrets any of her decisions. When we first meet her, she is a beauty, but one that Ashendon can't appreciate. She seduces him. Later he finds out that he is merely one of a stable of diversions. Her response? "Take me as I am," she retorts. And so he does, from decade to decade. What he does learn is that of all the characters in the book it is only she who has remained true to her vision of self. She may suffer as a result of her choices but she evinces not a smidgeon of regret. When readers today analyze CAKES AND ALE, they begin by noting the biting satire, but they always finish with Rosie and her vision of self.

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Cakes and Ale is a delicious satire of London literary society between the Wars. Social climber Alroy Kear is flattered when he is selected by Edward Driffield's wife to pen the official biography of her lionized novelist husband, and determined to write a bestseller. But then Kear discovers the great novelist's voluptuous muse (and unlikely first wife), Rosie. The lively, loving heroine once gave Driffield enough material to last a lifetime, but now her memory casts an embarrissing shadow over his career and respectable image. Wise, witty, deeply satisfying, Cakes and Ale is Maugham at his best.

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